RedWorks was founded to solve the problem of permanent human habitation on Mars, and for the last year we’ve been working to develop the technologies we debuted during the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge to solve the habitation problems we face on Earth. There is a global Affordable Housing Crisis at the root of so many of the problems facing the world today, and at RedWorks we’re looking to face it with technologies Made For Mars.

The Affordable Housing Crisis largely stems from both the economic growth and the continued political instability in the developing world. At a time where humans are regularly relocating for new opportunities and from political upheaval, the current systems used to secure housing are no longer up to the task for a more mobile world. The tools for selecting sites, designing communities, financing their construction, zoning, building infrastructure, and then building the houses themselves were all created for a more “fixed” economy. These are systems and technologies created to providing housing for a world where individuals might move, but whole populations would not uproot themselves at a moment’s notice and relocate. This has led to the creation of massive refugee camps, political instability in refugee host countries, unsustainable slums surrounding urban centers in the developing world, and a generation without homeownership in the developed world. In short: we have a world with a lot of people in need of affordable homes, and no way to provide them. What is needed is a more nimble and cost-effective series of solutions for providing housing.

As the colonization of the Moon, Mars, and asteroids has the potential to be the largest mass-migration in history, many of the same challenges contributing to the Affordable Housing Crisis on Earth will be faced in space. At RedWorks, we’ve been developing those solutions to provide human habitation and infrastructure in space and on Earth. Solutions like RedWorks’ In-Situ Additive Construction (ISAC) technology, which would reduce the cost of building homes by reducing, build materials to just what is available on-site. Roads, homes, and utilities would be printed just from local sources of dirt, cutting overhead to the bone and reducing the time to set up a construction site by reducing the materials that have to be shipped to the build site. In addition, the life support systems designed to provide sustainable sources of air, food, water, and sanitation in space, would allow individual homes to provide some of these basic needs of their occupants, further reducing the strain on existing infrastructure, and reducing the lifetime carbon footprint of the home. Furthermore, the same parametric algorithm we use to generate habitat designs for Mars can be paired with traffic and weather pattern analytics to generate plans for ideal communities on Earth, automatically. Homes and infrastructure can be scaled and positioned to direct the flow of air currents for a kind of built-in, community-wide climate control system; or take advantage of local traffic patterns to design roads that reduce commute times and benefit the local economy. All of these technologies can converge together to see that the design, construction, and habitation of housing is less expensive, more nimble, and truly sustainable.​RedWorks is excited to have the opportunity to potentially compete in a prize along the Housing Prize Roadmap. Prizes like this helped spur innovations in Aviation, Spaceflight, and Healthcare to solve some of the greatest problems facing the world. We believe this prize is a way to begin to solve the Affordable Housing Crisis. It is our hope, that the Affordable Housing Visioneers team becomes the next XPRIZE, and we hope to continue the conversations about the Affordable Housing Roadmap with XPRIZE as we continue to develop solutions to the problems facing people on Earth with technology Made For Mars.